Glaxo Read online

  GLAXO

  Copyright © 2009 by Hernán Ronsino

  Originally published in Spanish by Eterna Cadencia in 2009

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Melville House Publishing, LLC

  First Melville House printing: January 2017

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.​com facebook.​com/​mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Ebook ISBN 9781612195681

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Marina Drukman

  v4.1

  a

  The order strikes like lightning.

  “Get that one, he’s still breathing!”

  He hears three explosions at point-blank range. At the first one, a cloud of dust shoots up by his head. Then he feels a searing pain in his face and his mouth fills with blood. The guards don’t bend down to see if he’s dead. Seeing his face split open and bloody is enough for them. And so they walk off, believing they’ve given him the coup de grâce.

  —RODOLFO WALSH, Operation Massacre

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  VARDEMANN

  October 1973

  Part II

  BICHO SOUZA

  December 1984

  Part III

  MIGUELITO BARRIOS

  July 1966

  Part IV

  FOLCADA

  December 1959

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Part I

  VARDEMANN

  October 1973

  One day the trains stop coming. Then a work team arrives. Six or seven men get out of a truck. They wear yellow helmets. They begin pulling up the tracks. I watch them from here. I watch them work. They work until six. They leave before the workers from the Glaxo factory punch out. They leave behind a few metal drums with burning rubbish, to block off traffic. When they leave, I close the barbershop.

  That’s when I begin to dream about trains. About trains that run off the tracks. They sway from side to side before they fall. They destroy the tracks. Sparks fly. And then comes that noise, so shrill, just before they halt. So shrill it hurts your teeth. It moves you. Like when my razor blade scrapes over the back of the neck, and heads shudder, shoulders shudder, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Bicho Souza or old man Berman, their shoulders shake like the carriage of a train running off the tracks. A shiver, they call it. Then there’s a warmth, on the back of the neck. And the itch of the powdered brush, sweeping the neck.

  And then a primitive calm.

  Now it’s a warm afternoon, a Saturday. That’s why nobody’s working over there. Just the blackened metal drums, burning with fires that never before seemed to exist by day, with the fires burning that don’t seem to be there during the day. My father and I drink yerba maté. The municipal ambulance speeds around the corner where Souza’s butcher shop stands, and stops opposite the Barrios’ house. With the maté in my hand, I watch from behind the door. Two doctors get out. One of them goes into the house, and Miguelito’s mother greets him. The other takes out the stretcher and pushes it into the house. My father is bent over in the corner, distant and old, worn down like a bone that has been picked over. Hurry up with the maté, he says. A few minutes later the men come out, bearing the stretcher. Miguelito’s mother has a fit of crying. Juan Moyano envelops her in an embrace. Once again, Miguelito Barrios is in the ambulance, on his way to the hospital.

  This is the second time it has rained since the work team has been pulling up the train tracks. Now, they say, the train takes another branch line after Gorostiaga and passes by Sud, the station where before only freight trains passed through on their way from La Pampa. Endless trains. Loaded with wheat. It’s the second time it has rained since the work team has been pulling up the tracks. The municipal trucks plough through the mud and are loaded with sleepers. Then they drive off, leaving behind furrows that the kids kick at as soon as they’ve dried, as if they were the walls of an abandoned house. But the problem is that the mud gets in everywhere. The watered-down muck sticks to everything. It covers women’s shoes, the bicycles belonging to the workers at the Glaxo factory, the boots of the men who come into the barbershop and mess up the floor—despite my putting down newspaper to avoid such a disaster. It gets dragged in on the soles of shoes that sit on the footrest of the main chair, the reclining chair.

  My father sweeps up the hair on the ground around the main chair, the reclining chair, painted sky blue. Three haircuts so far today. Hair from Tito Krause, Luis Aragón, and a boy who lives behind the silos piles up and melds together while my father sweeps and drags it across the mosaic tiles of black granite. It becomes a confused pile of chestnut brown and blond, mixed in with the dried mud that persists in appearing. Outside, in a clearing in the cane field, one of the men from the work team prepares a barbecue. When my father opens the door, when he goes out, bent over and slow, a broom in his hand to sweep the well-trodden path of hard, dry earth, the smell of grilling meat enters the barbershop, coming from over in the clearing of the cane field, and awakens in me a decrepit, sharp anguish. So I go out. The firm midday sun is dazzling. The summer air is ripening. I lean one arm against the door-frame. My father sweeps, with difficulty. The rest of the work team rests beneath the shade of the chinaberry trees, where there used to be a bar called the Ace of Spades. They sit on the ground, their backs against the wall, their crossed legs stretching over the brick pavement.

  Then later, Lucio Montes, leaning back slightly in the main chair, talks about the fight last Sunday night, at the Bermejo Club. He talks about a guy from Mechita, a real killer, who fought Lavi, this guy Lavi from the area around Federación, and he tells me that on that night, he, Montes, didn’t want to put on a bet, that he didn’t go for it because he’s a wimp, even though he thought he had a sure thing, and that Lavi the Kid knocked out the big guy from Mechita with one hit. Then, while Montes talks and I work, in silence, trimming the tips of his greasy hair, outside, on Souza’s corner, we can see Miguelito Barrios again, holding himself up on their unfinished wall, walking with difficulty, pallid and thin just like my father. I stop, I suspend the movement of my scissors. Montes takes no notice, he keeps on talking, he says that even if Lavi looked a sorry sight, he knew, says Montes, that Lavi would knock out that big guy. He begins to angle for my attention only now, after I’ve spent a long while without moving the scissors through his hair. Montes watches me watching Miguelito Barrios, who now goes into Souza’s butcher shop. So he’s back, I say with surprise. Yes, apparently there’s no cure, murmurs Montes, in a different tone, as if in fear. And then he sighs and forgets, just for a moment, about Lavi the Kid and all that business about the fight in the Bermejo Club.

  I pull down the shutters. The sound echoes through the houses. The metal drums, blackened, light up the piles of sleepers that will be loaded, sometime later, into the trucks from the municipal council. Crickets thrill amongst the weeds. The night advances without mercy across the countryside. It seems to enclose us. I put the padlock in place and turn the key, twice. I pull at it, before I go, to make sure it’s firmly locked. I stick close to the walls, onto which the sun has beaten all afternoon, and I can still feel the heat seeping out of the bricks as I walk the twenty-metre distance home. I open the door and go in. I’m met with the sweet smell of fried onion and dull lighting. I take off the white apron I work in. (The white apron is part of my skin, I think.) My father is grating cheese onto the table. Miss Marta is in the kitchen, her back to me, stirring a bubbling saucepan. She would ha
ve put the pasta on the minute she heard the sound of the shutters. I go into the bathroom. I piss. The hard, white laundry soap darkens slightly as I scrub my hands, until the water cleans it, but still leaves behind a grey stain, like a gummy film. We sit at the table. Miss Marta tells my father not to eat any more cheese, in a scolding tone. Miss Marta serves us. I open a bottle of red wine. My father holds out his glass. Don’t overdo it, says Miss Marta. I pour a glass for my father, who already has a plate of pasta in front of him. Columns of steam rise up hurriedly and fog over his glasses. How many, asks my father, while he stirs through the pasta with his fork. Six, in total, I answer, as I pull off a chunk of bread. We eat in silence.

  A truck from Bustos’ brickworks crashes into the row of blackened metal drums that burn until seven thirty in the morning, when the work team arrives in the rusted-out Bedford truck. Before they start work, before they put on their yellow helmets, they rub their hands together, they talk amongst themselves in a murmur. One of them, perhaps, makes a joke, makes fun of one of the others, and they laugh gently, and then they begin to extinguish the blackened metal drums, and store them away in the clearing in the cane field. Before the work team arrives, a truck from Bustos’ brickworks, it seems, crashes into the row of metal drums, and some of the load of hollow bricks falls onto the road that leads to Fogón.

  Miss Marta hangs a pair of my father’s pants on the washing line that runs across the yard. I suck on the bitter yerba maté, sitting beneath the vines, and watch her. Her back curves over, almost on tiptoes, and with a peg in her mouth she straightens out a leg of the grey pants, dripping soapy liquid from the cuff. The work team, which had worked all morning on the edges of the tracks, now rests under the chinaberry trees of the Ace of Spades. From beneath the vines you can see the railway embankment sink through the countryside until it arrives at Route 5. From there it runs by the road for several kilometres. Beneath the sun, Miss Marta finishes hanging out the washing. She tips out the remaining soapy water from the bucket amongst the stakes holding up the green tomato plants. She comes near. She asks for some yerba maté. I serve her. She sits, and waits. Your father is asleep, she tells me, looking me in the eyes, as she pokes out her tongue slightly to sip on the maté. Miss Marta has her fingernails painted in red. She never stops looking at me, as she sucks on the straw. She sucks the maté dry. Twice she sucks it dry. She gives it back to me. Nice, she says. She gets up and walks close by me. As she brushes past, I bury my hand between her legs. Miss Marta stops. She doesn’t turn around or say anything. She stops. I grab her from behind, and like always, without me asking, Miss Marta lifts up her dress, pulls down her panties and takes hold of the back of the chair, facing forward, opening her legs and bending over slightly. First I stick a finger in. Miss Marta lets out a strange gasp. Then slowly, with difficulty, I penetrate her. While she feels the stiffness entering her slowly, Miss Marta holds tightly to the back of the chair. The knuckles whiten on her hand, which, today, have fingernails painted in red.

  Then I dream of trains. About trains that run off the tracks. They sway from side to side before they fall. They destroy the tracks. Sparks fly. And then comes that noise, so shrill, just before they halt. So shrill it hurts your teeth. It moves you. Like when my razor blade scrapes over the back of the neck, and heads shudder, shoulders shudder, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Bicho Souza or old man Berman, their shoulders shake like the carriage of a train running off the tracks. A shiver, they call it. Then there’s a warmth, on the back of the neck. And the itch of the powdered brush, sweeping the neck. And then a primitive calm.

  My day off, says Juan Moyano, as he obeys the order I give him, to lean forward a bit, a bit more, the head forward, and Juan Moyano obeys (like everyone else) the instructions I give him. Every two months, Juan Moyano walks into the barbershop, offers a friendly greeting and sits in the wicker chair (that is, if I’m already attending to someone else), picks up a copy of Gráfico magazine, crosses his legs and turns the pages slowly. When I ask him to take a seat, in the main chair, the reclinable chair, painted sky blue, he shakes my hand, I cover him with the blue smock to protect him after I’ve shaken it out, and he says: Same as always, Vicente, fix up the yard a bit for me. How are things, I ask him. Then Juan Moyano shakes his head, and channels the conversation towards work and politics: Things are getting serious, things are heating up. Now he tells me he’s got the day off. He explains the work roster: One week of day shift, a day off, another week of night shift, a day off, and so on like that, your whole world is turned upside down all the time, Juan Moyano tells me calmly. He has been working for fifteen years in the oil factory. It’s hard to sleep during the day, any little noise wakes you up. And I’m a light sleeper anyway, he says. And then, all those guys, I say, referring to the work team who right now is loading dirt onto the municipal trucks. Juan Moyano shakes his white head again and says: Don’t even remind me. Then I think that Juan Moyano is a good man, a good working man. And I ask myself: Why did he get together with Miguelito Barrios’s mother, after Miguelito Barrios’s mother became a widow. It looks like they’re going to strip the cane field, and where the tracks were they’re going to build a road that will join up with Route 5, a link road, says Juan Moyano with enthusiasm. I finish the job. All done, I say, taking off the blue smock, and while I brush him off, Juan Moyano buries his right hand in his pocket and asks me how much. Same as always, I answer. And Juan Moyano pays. Before he opens the door to the street, he stops and says to me, fearfully: Vicente, Miguelito wants you to come by one of these days. Then he goes out. The white head of Juan Moyano shimmers beneath the morning sun.

  It’s Sunday and it’s raining. Miss Marta isn’t working today. Miss Marta is preparing a meal. She’s looking after my father. She’s looking after us. I drink maté and listen to the radio, watching the rain. The water seems to give the walls of the Glaxo factory an oily skin. And the ground turns red because of Bustos’ hollow bricks, which fell off the truck a few days ago. In the beginning, when the rain started, the little flames in the blackened metal drums doubled over to survive. But the downpour really started after midday. And the blackened metal drums let off a brief and thick cloud of smoke. My father is taking his siesta. He coughs a terrible cough that echoes throughout the house. His cough becomes stranger every day, like an unknown voice. Then I see someone appear in the clearing in the cane field. It’s Bicho Souza’s son. He’s drenched. His legs are covered in mud. He’s pulling a little cart. He stops in the clearing, aiming a green shotgun, made of plastic. He throws himself to the deck, body to the ground. From behind the window of my house, I realise, as I sip on maté, and listen to Pedro Maffia play the accordion on the radio, and as the rain gives an oily skin to the walls of the Glaxo factory, turning the earth into a reddish mud, that tomorrow I will have to put up with the mud that will be dragged in and left on the footrest of the main chair, the reclining chair, painted sky blue. Then I see Bicho Souza’s son, alone, moving through the rain with a green shotgun, made of plastic, playing at war and facing up at long last to those endless ghosts in the cane field.

  First I hear the dry breathing of Miguelito Barrios. I hear it as I walk toward his bedroom, behind his mother. When I go in, I see a lump covered in blankets in the shadows of a room that smells like medication and disinfectant. When he sees me, he has a fit of coughing. And the foreign sound of the coughing reminds me of my father, in the house opposite, also lying down, accompanied by Miss Marta, who sits in a chair by the bed, fixing her red fingernails. Thank you, rasps Miguelito Barrios’s dry voice. I just wince at him, give him a measured smile. I don’t know what to say on these occasions. Even less when it’s Miguelito Barrios, looking at me with sadness, trying to want to tell me something, something that hurts him as much as or even more than his coughing, which erupts unexpectedly, shaking his lungs and his body and the blankets on the bed that cover the future remains of Miguelito Barrios. But he doesn’t say anything. I begin to cut his hair. The blond dry tips f
all onto a blue smock I lay on top of the covers. Outside, the sounds of the work team can be heard, finishing off the job. It starts to get hot. I wonder if Miguelito Barrios will last until the end of the year. Then I think of my father and the summer, and then of Miss Marta and the summer. Miguelito Barrios grabs my arm. He’s nervous. His hands are clammy, he’s sweating. Don’t say anything, I tell him. Don’t worry. And these words hurt him more. He lets out a small whimper. He mumbles the beginnings of an explanation, the beginning of a plea for forgiveness. I impose my healthy, powerful voice over his, to erase his presence. Miguel, don’t worry, I say, so much time has passed. I brush his hair, with a part to the side. I prepare him for the final goodbye. Then I leave the Barrios’ house, wondering if it’s right to forgive a dying man. I cross into the shade of the chinaberry trees. The work team finishes loading their tools into the municipal trucks. The cane field no longer exists, they’ve cleared it completely, and where the tracks once were, now there’s a new road, a link road, which looks more like a closed wound. It’s a road that looks like the memory of a wound in the earth that won’t heal.

  Part II

  BICHO SOUZA

  December 1984

  You’re no more than the reflection of the toes on your feet, I think, as I walk out of the Cinema Español, moved. I stop outside, in front of the poster for Last Train from Gun Hill: the young faces of Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, atop an advancing train, stare back at me defiantly. I light a smoke. In the hall, a new queue forms slowly for the second screening. Somebody greets me. At last I get done with coming out of the movie (my thoughts drift away from the final scene: the showdown at the station, the train leaving, the bodies by the tracks, dead, and the look of that woman set free). I come back to reality and I discover a different town. There’s been a downpour. While I was watching the film, together with eight or nine others, including Sardoni, who parked his blue Gordini on the corner of the Moulin Rouge, and the Echeverrías, they say a great big storm came down that made the temperature drop five degrees. Now the pavement is wet, it’s night and it has cooled down. Then that feeling of coming out into a different town hits me in the face again, like when I was a kid and we would come out of the matinee—after spending nearly four hours in another world—we came out at nighttime, in the middle of winter, our eyes tired from watching so many movies. This brief renewal, of the town and of oneself in the town, happens again now, because I was not there when the storm blew in—I was outside of time—I was not there when the town got mixed up in that wind that would have surely blown shut the doors and the windows, that would have stirred up clouds of dust to blind the eyes. I cross the street. The lights slip off the wet pavement. I feel like I’m walking in another place, like I’m on holiday, looking for a restaurant to eat in, like there’s a river nearby, a boardwalk lined with streetlights that illuminate, in stains, the edges of the river. But I go into Don Pedrín. And I sit at the table by the window. A waiter approaches. He leaves me a menu and an ashtray. The waiter looks like Anthony Quinn’s son: the waiter looks like the killer. Then the Echeverrías come in, first the wife, then Echeverría himself. The wife wears sandals that leave her toes showing, and I think, again, obsessively, You’re no more than the reflection of the toes on your feet.